Well, Boltorr Rd survived the move and now sits awaiting attention in the basement at Bloke Acres.

It will be a few more weeks before I can get to grips with the layout again, but I have a long todo list in my head.

Boltorr Brook looking under the railway bridge towards the dam

At the top is getting the track laid and the DCC control sorted out. There is only one cross-over in the whole layout and this will be DCC controlled as well.

There is only room for a short fiddleyard at either end of the layout, but since traffic will be only a couple of two-coach or six wagon trains that should suffice. The limited length means I shall either have to use a sector table or a traverser.

Anyway, I’ve included a panorama view of the layout which, I hope, will illustrate my attempt to show a small section of railway situated in a three dimensional world. I’ve really gone all out to avoid the table-top look. The most important aspect was to continue the terrain below the track level.

The foreground is pretty much set. The background profile will be finished when the dam is placed and integrated into the scenery.

Eventually there will be a scale effect of over 100ft/30m from the Boltorr Brook to the highest points. I hope it will be effective.

Profile view of the diorama showing the vertical nature of the scenery

Well, the last few months have been exciting. But now, Mrs Bloke and I are now installed in our new – well nearly a century old – house in a cool little town in New Jersey.

Bloke Acres

And as I have mentioned before; “The English think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time…”

So Americans will go, “How quaint”. And Brits will yawn.

Yes, the garage is still full of boxes, as is the dining room. But we’re getting there. Working towards … as the education jargon used to say.

Our last move took two or three months to settle down. And even then, this time we moved, there were a dozen boxes which hadn’t been opened since the last move.

That is a barnstar up there. Akin to a lucky horseshoe I would think. It’ll be staying. We’ll need all the luck we can get come November. But that’s another story.

Anyhoooooo… it’s now a ten minute – brisk – walk into town. Even the theatre is only about a fifteen minute walk away. Uber and GrubHub work here so we’re doing our bit for the deconstruction of Capitalism, and the implementation of a Brave New World, or exploitation, if you like. (I’m going for the “more is more” theory of punctuation in that sentence). And yes, the full-stop outside the brackets is English, not American English, whatever that is.

Now the Important Things, apart from the love and devotion of a wonderful life partner, Mrs Bloke. The things that make my heart go Zing! Hopefully for a while longer.

Bicycles: Somehow we have to accommodate about seven+ or so alternative means of transport here. But it will be done! This is a cool little town, and I’m going to ride my bikes around it. And on occasions I’ll be forced to report. See here.

Model railway: You know it’s not a toy train? Not a train set? This is the world Jones ThatBloke made… It’s been on hiatus for a few months so not much – actually nothing – has happened. But somehow it survived the move and the wibbly-wobbly way into our new – well, oldish, like I said before – basement/cellar/vault/panic room without any damage or other issue. Thanks to our movers, Simonik, who did a great job.

I have to rethink the ends of the layout, Boltorr Road, since this isn’t much more than a diorama. The trains will still have to start from somewhere, negotiate my own little world and then move on. At this moment, I’m thinking a traverser or sector table. Maybe even a Nelevator?

Boltorr Road’s new home

Hifi: Not certain what’s happening with that yet, but whatever, it’ll be good – of course.

So, plenty to do. But lots of time to do it.

I’m really looking forward to making this place Mrs Bloke’s and mine. Did I mention the Fibre Room?

This was done by rolling air-curing clay very thinly, breaking it up into scale sized “stones” and individually gluing them onto the structure of the walls.

However, this was pretty labour intensive and I wasn’t enthralled by the thought of sticking thousands of individual stones over possibly hundreds of square inches.

A work in progress

So I’ve gone for another method to represent the masonry on the reservoir barrier. Rolling the clay really thin – around a millimetre – and glueing the sheets onto the structure, then inscribing the stones while the clay is still plastic.

For my first test I glued the clay directly onto a piece of foam board. This resulted in the board warping as it dried. It seems the board I’m using is faced with a card veneer which absorbs water and deforms as it dries out.

I solved this by adding some extra bracing to the rear of any large flat area and sealing the card with an acrylic spray. This seems to work really well. The PVA glue I’m using still fixes the clay to the board.

I’m learning this as I go along, so I’ve had a couple of issues, the most serious being shrinkage of the clay layer causing a couple of cracks large enough to be embarrassing on a representation of a dam. This, as I found out, can be avoided by feathering the joints between adjacent pieces of clay.

I’ll need to go back over a couple bits of the model to eliminate the cracks when it’s all completely dry.

The “stones” were scribed by hand and a pointed piece of wood while the clay was still plastic. This leaves a fair amount of whiskery material sticking out of the wall, but this will be sanded back. So far it looks pretty good.

I found the most effective way of marking the random stone was to treat most blocks as irregular pentagons, filling in with rectangular and triangular blocks as appropriate. At the present rate, the rendering is going to take about three to four hours in total.

But every now and again I just crave a tantalising glimpse of what will be in my universe.

Work is going on on the course of the Boltorr Brook from the reservoir barrier, under the rail bridge and onwards into the Tamar valley.

The major construction is that of the Boltorr dam. Once that is set into the landscape the rest of the path of the river will be set.

Simultaneous work is also happening for the abutments of the rail bridge. Actually, the space between the bridge and the dam doesn’t look so great now so I need to see how it can all be fitted in without looking unfeasibly crowded.

Class 153 First Great Western service heads for Boltorr Road Halt

I couldn’t resist unpacking my Class 153, First Great Western DMU and posing it on the bridge.

The dam looms up behind it. I’m in the process of fitting engineering brick vaults up under the overflow arches, so the T-pins are doing their job.

I’ve been experimenting with facing the foam board of the structure with air-curing clay. I’m glad I’ve done a couple of test with this, because it seems essential to keep the thickness of the clay at no more than 1mm otherwise it’s tending to distort the foam board. This particular board seems to be faced with cardboard, which is okay, but make it prone to warping in the presence of moisture.

However, my last test, braced board, lacquered to resist moisture, 1mm DAS clay and a base coat of “granite” looking matt acrylic is looking pretty good, so once the glue has cured, any excesses and drips cleaned and trimmed off I think I’ll be moving on to the next step.

Class 153 trundles over the Boltorr Brook with the reservoir in the background

All smoke and mirrors. The back of Boltorr dam. Foam-board, PVA and hot glue

… The heart doesn’t grieve over.

Construction is going well on the Boltorr dam.

Foam-board, PlastiKard, PVA and hot-glue are the essential parts of my builder’s arsenal.

As I’ve mentioned before, the actual structure is quite large, although I’ve scaled it back as far as I can so it still looks mighty, but in scale with its surroundings. A real dam, even a small one would probably take up five or six foot of space to faithfully represent as well as a couple of feet of depth as well.

Although I’ve been as accurate as I can with the marking out, on occasions I’ve adjusted it to “look right” rather than worry too much about getting my laser level out. Btw; I actually don’t have a laser level.

Looking up at the Boltorr Reservoir dam from “eye-level”. Glue beads to be trimmed and gaps will – hopefully – be filled at the masonry stage.

But now the glue is almost set I’m starting to look at it from the perspective of the layout to see where I can leave gaps, and on the other hand, stuff I can’t get away with.

Since the dam will be set right to the back of the scenery I’m not too concerned about the back of the dam. I am not an OCD completist.

However, checking the structure from the viewpoint of the layout I will need to represent “under the arches” and any flow control devices a dam like this would have.

I think the dam needs a run-off to keep the Boltorr Brook from drying up, so I just have to figure how to represent that.

I’m going to give the structure a couple of days for the glue to set and cure. First job will be trimming the beads of glue which are visible, then experimenting with getting a thin lamination of DAS clay to adhere to the foam-board to form the basis of rendering the granite masonry.

The contours of the layout east of – behind – the track are really going to be determined by the setting of the dam walls in the Boltorr Brook valley.

Marking out the structure onto foam-board

So construction is now quite a high priority.

This is going to be quite a large edifice, about 600mm long and 300mm high. In scale about 150ft/45m long and 75ft/23m high.

I considered using the same method to represent stonework as I had on the Bolt Tor tunnel portal, but, as effective as it is, it would be a considerable amount of work to render the entire reservoir structure in that manner.

Besides, the portal method produced a very rough stone texture, appropriate enough given it was originally built by French prisoners of war, whereas the dam retention walls are going to be rather more dressed and regular in a Victorian mason sort of way.

So, I’m building up the form the stonework from foam-board and plastic card. I’m ten going to roll DAS Clay as thinly as I can, hopefully under 2mm thick and laminate it onto the foam-board. When it’s dry I’m going to carve the stone courses into the clay and, hopefully, achieve a realistic 3D effect.